The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Eric Schmitt's hometown newspaper, has such 'respect' for him that it seemed to take special delight in carving him a new anal cavity for concocting a perjury trap that went awry

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My news feed, as I write this, is filled with so many splendid beatdowns of U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) that it's impossible to pick a favorite. Schmitt, the junior senator from the Show-Me State, is the lawmaker who intended to set a perjury trap for former special counsel Jack Smith at Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and wound up becoming the punchline for a seemingly endless stream of online jokes. 

As of today, I'm embarrassed to say that I grew up in Missouri, a state not only represented by Eric Schmitt in the U.S. Senate but also by the execrable Josh Hawley (who has made so many wacky statements that Mother Jones' David Corn devoted an entire article to them.) In my lifetime, Missouri has produced an abundance of admirable politicians, from both parties. They include Democrats Thomas Eagleton, Warren Hearnes, Claire McCaskill, Richard Gephardt, Stuart Symington, and Mel Carnahan. They also should include Jerry Litton, who after serving in the U.S. House of Representatives was running for the U.S. Senate when he and his family died in a plane crash in 1976 on the night of his victory in the Democratic primary. I was 19 years old at the time, and I remember having an empty feeling upon hearing of Litton's death the next morning. In an effort to make money for college, I worked that summer in a nearby rubber factory that made V-belts for vehicles, appliances, record players and the like. I saw a lot of military belts come down the line, so I assumed they must have been used in tanks, armored vehicles, maybe weapons. All of this comes to mind because I have a vague memory of Jerry Litton visiting our plant that summer. I don't think I saw him, but I do seem to recall co-workers talking about his visit. I would go on to cast my first presidential ballot, for Jimmy Carter, that November, and I remember political pundits viewing Jerry Litton as a possible president someday. That made me wonder how Litton's political career might have turned out -- and if I might have wound up voting for him. 

On the GOP side, probably the three best-known names at that time were John Danforth, Christopher "Kit" Bond, and Gene Taylor. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley have combined to convince me that the days of honorable Republicans from Missouri are over -- maybe forever.

Schmitt is so "revered" in Missouri that his hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, seemed to take special delight in ripping him a new one for his ham-handed antics in the Jack Smith hearing. I enjoyed the P-D's editorial so much that I'm going to highlight some of my favorite lines in yellow. I hope you will get a highlighter of your favorite color and follow along with me. If you have come to loath Eric Schmitt, you will love the piece from the Post-Dispatch's editorial board. It will make you think, it will make you laugh, and it might even make you let out a hearty "Amen, Brother!" along the way. Let's give it a look, under the headline "Editorial: Schmitt airballs with 'dirtbag' attack":

Just when you think Eric Schmitt couldn’t possibly embarrass himself and his constituents any more than he already has, he goes in for a rhetorical layup, gratuitously throws an elbow, spectacularly misses the shot and then stomps around the court indignantly when the ref calls foul.

That’s all metaphorical, of course. What Missouri’s perpetually seething junior senator really, truly did on Tuesday (in front of the whole country!) was to proffer a loony right-wing conspiracy based on some misunderstood text messages; falsely accuse a prosecutor of perjury; call him a "villain" and a “total dirtbag” — and then stand by that playground-level pejorative even after the whole thing turned out to be a lazy mistake on the part of Schmitt and his staff regarding, of all things, a basketball game.

This is the man representing 6 million Missourians in the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Sheesh.

What felt like an especially cringey episode of the HBO political comedy “Veep” began when Schmitt went after former special counsel Jack Smith during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. In the upside-down moral universe that Schmitt and his fellow MAGA apostles occupy, the worst offense against constitutional democracy in our lifetimes wasn’t President Donald Trump’s damnable attempt to overturn the 2020 election; it was Smith’s admirable attempt to hold him accountable for it with criminal charges.

That and other legitimate criminal cases against Trump evaporated when he was reelected president in 2024. Trump’s congressional lickspittles (none more lickspittle-y than Schmitt) have been trying ever since to prosecute the prosecutor.

It was in pursuit of that twisted goal that Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended a February 2024 NBA game in Atlanta between the Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors. Smith — whose face conveyed that he was confused about the relevance of the question — said he was certain he hadn’t attended that game.

That’s when Schmitt sprung what he clearly imagined was his brilliant trap. A staffer briefly held up a poster board showing some text messages that, Schmitt declared, proved “you were in Atlanta, at a Warriors-Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024.”

Why is that relevant? Because that was the day after Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis publicly admitted an affair with her special prosecutor, thus endangering her own criminal proceedings against Trump. In Schmitt’s telling, this supposed evidence of Smith being in Atlanta proved the two anti-Trump prosecutors were improperly colluding on damage control from Willis’ admitted affair for the sake of their joint obsession with nailing Trump.

"I don't think you know we have this stuff,” said Schmitt, referring to the text messages in a tone that can only be described as glowering, “so I'll give you a second to process it so you don't perjure yourself.”

He subsequently added, “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” and declared Smith “a villain” and “a total dirtbag.”

Got all that? 

Good. So here’s the thing: None of it happened.

Smith did remember being at, not an NBA game in Atlanta, but a college women's basketball game in Maryland around that time — Maryland Terrapins vs. Iowa Hawkeyes. It was Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who finally put it all together. Schmitt and his staff’s “ah-ha!” moment came down to them discovering Smith had been at a basketball game that night but misconstruing which game it was.

Wrong teams, wrong league, wrong state. It was based entirely on that sloppy staffing that Schmitt furiously accused Smith of perjury. 

You can tell a lot about a person based on how he reacts to making an embarrassing gaffe that, in this case, literally involved public, false criminal allegations. Is he apologetic? Regretful? Gracious? Even a little classy? Or does he lash out, his voice rising in anger, at the person he wronged?

As Klobuchar chided Schmitt for his recklessness and his “dirtbag” comment, Missouri’s junior senator growled: “I stand by that statement.”

And we’ll just leave it to readers to decide whose behavior in this story qualifies for the label “dirtbag” — let alone "villain."